State Constitutions and Statutes
In many cases, the Court has held that it is generally bound by state supreme court decisions interpreting state constitutions and statutes.159 In several cases, the Court has expressly said that, by the same token, state courts are bound by the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the federal constitution and statutes. This section discusses three early cases to show that (1) the Court’s decisions in these cases, unlike the Martin quartet, do expressly say state courts must obey the Court’s decisions on federal law; (2) the statements are dicta; and (3) the cases do not agree on the legal source of the state courts’ duty.
court had rejected a federal claim or defense, and not if the state court had upheld the federal claim or defense. Skelly, 9 Ohio St. at 612 (stating that “the limited and qualified character of the appellate jurisdiction, conferred by the 25th section of the judiciary act [of 1789], does not countenance the idea . . . that Congress had in view a uniformity of decisions upon questions arising under the constitution and laws of the United States, and that the Supreme Court was the common arbiter for the decision of such questions”).
158. Jefferson Branch, 66 U.S. at 448 (“It has been decided three times by this court . . . that the acts of Ohio, upon which the Supreme Court of Ohio has assumed the State’s right to tax the State Bank of Ohio and its branches differently from the taxes stipulated for in the . . . [bank’s]
charter, were and are unconstitutional and void”).
159. See, e.g., Hortonville Joint Sch. Dist. No. 1 v. Hortonville Educ. Ass’n, 426 U.S. 482, 488 (1976) (accepting state supreme court’s interpretation of state statute). The general rule stated in the text has exceptions. See Henry Paul Monaghan, Supreme Court Review of State-Court Determinations of State Law in Constitutional Cases, 103 COLUM.L.REV. 1919, 1924 (2003) (referring to “a deeply embedded understanding that state-court determinations of state law in federal cases are open to some reexamination by the [U.S.] Supreme Court”).
The earliest case is Elmendorf v. Taylor.160 In Elmendorf, the Court reviewed a Kentucky state court decision in a land dispute.161 One issue before the Court was whether the plaintiff’s entry onto the disputed land was “notorious” enough to satisfy relevant state statutes.162 In an opinion for the Court by Chief Justice John Marshall, the Court said that “a considerable contrariety of opinion . . . would prevail” if the Court had to decide the issue itself.163 That would be unnecessary, however, if the issue had been resolved by the courts of Kentucky, for their interpretation of Kentucky statutes would bind the U.S. Supreme Court:
This Court has uniformly professed its disposition, in cases depending on the laws of a particular State, to adopt the construction which the Courts of the State have given to those laws. This course is founded on the principle, supposed to be universally recognized, that the judicial department of every government, where such department exists, is the appropriate organ for construing the legislative acts of that government. Thus, no Court in the universe, which professed to be governed by principle, would, we presume, undertake to say, that the Courts of Great Britain, or of France, or of any other nation, had misunderstood their own statutes, and therefore erect itself into a tribunal which should correct such misunderstanding. We receive the construction given by the Courts of the nation as the true sense of the law, and feel ourselves no more at liberty to depart from that construction, than to depart from the words of the statute.164
“On this principle,” the Court continued, “the construction given by this Court to the constitution and laws of the United States is received by all as the true construction.”165 This clearly means that the Court’s construction of the federal constitution and statutes binds
“all,” including state courts. It is dicta, however, because the issue was
160. 23 U.S. 152 (1825).
161. Id. at 157–59.
162. Id. at 158–59. (describing defendants’ argument that law temporarily prohibiting the surveyor from giving copies of the surveyed land to anyone other than the land’s owner of record
“excludes the idea of that notoriety which is ascribed to a record,” and plaintiff’s “den[ial] that the notoriety attached to a record is dependent entirely on the right to demand a copy of it”).
163. Id. at 159.
164. Id. at 159–60.
165. Id. at 160.
not before the Court, nor was the statement necessary to the Court’s reasoning.
The second early case, Green v. Neal’s Lessee, concerned the proper interpretation of two Tennessee statutes.166 The Court in Green quoted Elmendorf’s holding that “the courts of the United States, in cases depending on the laws of a particular state, will, in general adopt the construction which the courts of the state have given to those laws.”167 The Court in Green also addressed, in dicta, the converse situation:
On all questions arising under the constitution and laws of the union, this court may exercise a revising power; and its decisions are final and obligatory on all other judicial tribunals, state as well as federal. A state tribunal has a right to examine any such questions, and to determine thereon; but its decision must conform to that of the Supreme Court, or the corrective power may be exercised.168
In this passage, Green rests the state courts’ duty to “conform to” the Court’s federal-law decisions on the Court’s “revising” (or
“corrective”) power—i.e., its appellate jurisdiction under Article III.169
Thus, Green and Elmendorf cite different grounds for the state courts’ duty to obey the Court’s federal-law decisions. Whereas Green relies on the Court’s appellate jurisdiction under Article III, Elmendorf had relied on “the principle, supposed to be universally recognized, that the judicial department of every government . . . is the appropriate organ for construing the legislative acts of that government.”170 Green quotes this “principle” from Elmendorf, but only as the basis for the Court’s acceptance of state supreme court interpretations of state statutes, and not as the basis for the state court’s duty to obey U.S.
Supreme Court precedent on federal law.171
166. Green v. Neal’s Lessee, 31 U.S. 291, 293–94 (1832). Green, like Elmendorf, was a land dispute. Id. at 292–93. The statutes at issue in Green were Tennessee statutes of limitations. Id. at 293.
167. Green, 31 U.S. at 297 (quoting Elmendorf, 23 U.S. at 159).
168. Id. at 298.
169. Id.
170. Elmendorf, 23 U.S. at 159; see also id. (stating that “[o]n this principle” the Court’s decisions construing the Constitution and federal statutes “is received by all as the true construction”).
171. Green, 31 U.S. at 297 (quoting Elmendorf, 23 U.S. at 152).
There is a problem with Elmendorf’s ground for the state courts’
duty to obey U.S. Supreme Court decisions on federal law. The universal principle that it cites—i.e., “that the judicial department of every government . . . is the appropriate organ for construing the legislative acts of that government”172—comes from conflict-of-laws doctrine on proving the law of foreign nations.173 As such, the principle treats state courts and federal courts as foreign to each other.174 That treatment contradicts Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee and other decisions holding that state and federal courts are not analogous to the courts of independent sovereigns.175 Similarly, the Court has repeatedly rejected the notion that state courts can treat federal law as if it were the law of a foreign country.176 Given the tension between Elmendorf’s rationale and the Court’s other precedent, it is not surprising that this rationale does not reappear in Green or any other later decision.177
172. Elmendorf, 23 U.S. at 159.
173. Id. at 160; Green, 31 U.S. at 297. See also Arthur Nussbaum, The Problem of Proving Foreign Law, 50 YALE L.J. 1018, 1032–33 n.84 (1941) (discussing “universal principle” expressed in Elmendorf as “a sound phase of the fact theory” of proving foreign law); Kermit Roosevelt III, Resolving Renvoi: The Bewitchment of Our Intelligence by Means of Language, 80 NOTRE DAME L.REV. 1821, 1891 n.225 (2005) (citing Elmendorf in stating that “[t]he basic idea that nation-states are authoritative interpreters of their own law occupies a . . . fundamental place in international law”).
174. See Elmendorf, 23 U.S. at 159–60 (stating that “no Court in the universe, which professed to be governed by principle, would, we presume, undertake to say, that the Courts of Great Britain, or of France, or of any other nation, had misunderstood their own statutes, and therefore erect itself into a tribunal which should correct such misunderstanding”).
175. See Martin, 14 U.S. at 344 (rejecting argument that state judges “possess an absolute independence of the United States”); see also Haywood v. Drown, 556 U.S. 729, 734–35 (2009) (stating that “courts of the two jurisdictions [i.e., state and federal] are not foreign to each other, nor to be treated by each other as such, but as courts of the same country”) (quoting Claflin v.
Houseman, 93 U.S. 130, 136–37 (1876)); Minneapolis & St. Louis R.R. Co. v. Bombolis, 241 U.S.
211, 222 (1916) (stating that Constitution “cause[s] the governments and courts of both the nation and the several states not to be strange or foreign to each other . . . but to be all courts of a common country”).
176. Testa v. Katt, 330 U.S. 386, 389 (1947) (“[W]e cannot accept the basic premise . . . that [the Rhode Island Supreme Court] has no more obligation to enforce a valid penal law of the United States than it has to enforce a penal law of another state or a foreign country.”); see Howlett v.
Rose, 496 U.S. 356, 367 (1990) (stating that “[f]ederal law is enforceable in state courts . . . because the Constitution and laws passed pursuant to it are as much laws in the States as laws passed by the state legislature”); Mondou v. N.Y., New Haven & Hartford R.R. Co., 223 U.S. 1, 57 (1912) (stating that “[t]he United States is not a foreign sovereignty as regards the several states” (quoting Claflin, 93 U.S. at 136)).
177. Cf. Gelpcke v. City of Dubuque, 68 U.S. 175, 210 n.55 (1863) (Miller, J., dissenting) (citing Elmendorf in discussing Court’s duty to follow state supreme court decisions construing state statutes and constitutions and the “correlative proposition that to this court belongs the right
In contrast, Green’s reliance on the Court’s Article III appellate jurisdiction does appear in later decisions recognizing the state courts’
duty to obey the Court’s federal-law decisions. One later case, like Elmendorf and Green, is about the Court’s acceptance of state supreme court interpretations of state statutes: Provident Institute for Savings v. Massachusetts.178
In Provident, the Court reviewed a decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court rejecting a federal constitutional challenge to a state tax law.179 The Court said that the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s
“construction of the . . . tax laws of the State [in past decisions] . . . ought to be regarded as authorities in this court.”180 On the other hand, the Court said, “State decisions involving questions re-examinable here“—i.e., questions of federal law—”can have no authoritative influence in this court, because the State courts in deciding those few questions act in a subordinate relation to the paramount jurisdiction of this court . . . .”181 That subordinate relation flows from the Court’s interpretation of its appellate jurisdiction in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee.182 Thus, Provident, like Green, relies on the Court’s appellate jurisdiction as the basis for the state courts’ duty to obey the Court’s decisions on federal law.
The Court followed Green and Provident in later decisions recognizing the state court’s duty to obey its federal-law precedent.
The decisions included ones that—like Elmendorf, Green, and Provident—addressed the duty in dicta when reaffirming the Court’s policy of following state supreme court decisions construing state constitutions and statutes.183 Next we turn to modern decisions discussing the state courts’ duty outside that context.
to expound conclusively, for all other courts, the Constitution and laws of the Federal Government”).
178. 73 U.S. 611, 621 (1867).
179. Id. at 620–21.
180. Id. at 628.
181. Id.; see also Green v. Neal’s Lessee, 31 U.S. 291, 298 (1832) (citing Court’s “revising power” in explaining that the Court’s “decisions are final and obligatory on all other judicial tribunals, state as well as federal”).
182. 14 U.S. 304 (1816).
183. See, e.g., Murdock v. City of Memphis, 87 U.S. 590, 632 (1874) (stating in dicta that the Constitution and federal statutes give the Court “the right to decide [federal] questions finally and in a manner which would be conclusive on all other courts, State or National”).
3. Modern U.S. Supreme Court Decisions on the State Courts’ Duty